A Comparison between Evaluation of Computer Based Testing and Paper Based Testing for Subjects in Computer Programming

Evaluation criteria for different disciplines vary from subject to subject such as Computer science, Medicine, Management, Commerce, Art, Humanities and so on. Various evaluation criteria are being used to measure the retention of the students' knowledge. Some of them are in-class assignments, take home assignments, group projects, individual projects and final examinations. When conducting lectures in higher education institutes there can be more than one method to evaluate students to measure their retention of knowledge. During the short period of the semester system we should be able to evaluate students in several ways. There are practical issues when applying multiple evaluation criteria. Time management, number of students per subject, how many lectures delivered per semester and the length of the syllabus are the main issues.The focus of this paper however, is on identification, finding advantages and proposing an evaluation criterion for Computer based testing for programming subjects in higher education institutes in Sri Lanka. Especially when evaluating hand written answers students were found to have done so many mistakes such as programming mistakes. Therefore they lose considerable marks. Our method increases the efficiency and the productivity of the student's and also reduces the error rate considerably. It also has many benefits for the lecturer. With the low number of academic members it is hard to spend more time to evaluate them closely. A better evaluation criterion is very important for the students in this discipline because they should stand on their own feet to survive in the industry